Anthony Scrivener, barrister - obituary

Anthony Scrivener, who has died aged 79, was considered one of the great advocates at the Bar. His many high-profile clients included Dame Shirley Porter and Gerald Conlon of the Guildford Four; and he was approached to lead a legal team to challenge the lawfulness of the tribunal trying Saddam Hussein.

A lifelong Labour supporter, he was an instinctive moderniser, who relished challenging what he saw as the Bar’s stuffy conventions. He was also adept at public relations .

His defence of Tony Martin attracted widespread attention. Martin was the Norfolk farmer who, in 1999, shot in the back and killed a teenage intruder who was fleeing the premises. He was convicted of murder; that was later reduced to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.

Scrivener subsequently entered the debate about householders’ rights to defend their property, arguing that the Martin case was so exceptional that there was no justification for changing the law, and to do so would only encourage burglars to use weapons. “Are people really suggesting,” he wrote in a newspaper column, “that one should be allowed to blast a fist-sized hole through someone else’s back if they are on your property and appear to be up to no good?”

The son of a Kent ironmonger, Anthony Frank Bertram Scrivener was born on July 31 1935. An only child, he was educated at Kent College in Canterbury and later at University College London. He was called to the Bar by Gray’s Inn in 1959; he was a Holt Scholar. After that, at first, he earned his living as a lecturer in Ghana.

Returned to Britain within a couple of years he started a pupillage for the Bar. He worked in menial jobs in restaurants and elsewhere to pay for this; and started in practice in 1961.

He developed a lucrative practice, having a quick intelligence coupled with a tall, lean, stooping figure, swept-back hair and an attractive, though not upper-class, voice.

He took silk in 1975, the year he also became a recorder of the Crown Court. His work as a barrister covered diverse fields ranging from high finance (including multi million dollar fraud cases in Hong Kong) to murder and every subject in between. “A common law barrister like myself has seen every type of depravity possible,” he once remarked, “and can say it in Latin.”

In 1991, in a ground-breaking civil case, he acted for the grandmother of Lynn Siddons, a girl who had been brutally murdered, and managed to secure damages from her killer, Michael Brookes – even though at that stage Brookes had not yet stood trial. The judge ruled that “it was beyond reasonable doubt that Brookes had plainly murdered Lynn”.

Anthony Scrivener (Rex)

As was to be expected given Scrivener’s socially conscious attitude, he did plenty of pro bono and legal aid work. For instance, he was a member of the panel taking on Jamaican and other Caribbean capital murder appeals to the Privy Council. He worked to achieve greater ethnic diversity at the Bar, and promoted the idea that solicitors could become judges.

During the O J Simpson case, which was broadcast on Sky television, he expressed the view that most British judges would not mind admitting television cameras into their courts. Nevertheless, Scrivener was against scrapping the double jeopardy rule, and the Blair administration’s approach to the law troubled him so much that in 2007 he announced that he had resigned from the Labour Party.

“First they started muttering about getting rid of jury trials,” he reflected, “then [Blair] started wanting to appoint judges and then there was the Iraq war. I discovered this man was not Labour at all. He is in fact Right-wing. I have no time for him today.”

He loved parties and the congenial company of his legal friends but stood out as somewhat eccentric compared with other members of the Bar. Waistcoats and striped black trousers were not for him. He was a socialist and a republican. Yet his ability was universally recognised and he was elected chairman of the Bar in 1991. He was also made a Bencher of Lincoln’s Inn (as distinct from Gray’s Inn where he had been called).

He was faithful to the “taxi-cab rank rule” under which, subject to availability, counsel must be ready to represent litigants whose views differ fundamentally from his own. Thus he felt no qualms in representing Dame Shirley Porter – the former Westminster council leader ordered to pay a £27 million surcharge for selling council houses cheaply to boost Tory support – against the Westminster Council District Auditor.

Among his other clients were Sion Jenkins, the former deputy head teacher whose conviction for murdering his foster daughter was eventually quashed; Jack Lyons, one of the “Guinness Four”; and Asil Nadir. He acted for Ken Livingstone, who had also been up against him. Another cause célèbre was his successful defence of Winston Silcott, accused of murdering PC Keith Blakelock.

Scrivener never wanted to become a judge; and anyway his earnings were far above a judge’s remuneration. He played tennis and croquet as well as chess and cards. Walking with his dog gave him a favourite relaxation; as did motor racing and fast cars. He presented a number of television programmes on unsolved cases.

He married first, in 1964, Irén Becze, a Hungarian; the marriage was dissolved. He married secondly, in 1993, Ying Hui Tan. She survives him with a son and daughter from the first marriage.